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LLNL/RPI Supercomputer Smashes Simulation Speed Record

Posted by timothy on from the in-a-world-of-make-believe dept.

Lank writes "A team of computer scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have managed to coordinate nearly 2 million cores to achieve a blistering 504 billion events per second, over 40 times faster than the previous record. This result was achieved on Sequoia, a 120-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q normally used to run classified nuclear simulations. Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013."

3 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Re:can you put the paper online? by Lank · · Score: 5, Informative

    I didn't realize that it was acceptable to post it before the conference even happened. But you're right so here it is.

    --
    Gotta get me one of these!
  2. It was an LLNL supercomputer, not an RPI supercomp by DJefferson · · Score: 4, Informative

    The title to this piece is wrong. The supercomputer in question was Sequoia, the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Some preliminary work was done on a smaller RPI BG/Q machine, however. (I am a coauthor of the paper.)

  3. Re:what OS please? by DJefferson · · Score: 4, Informative

    It runs a custom IBM OS specifically designed for Blue Gene/Q. It proveds an API very similar to Linux, but with some restrictions, e.g. static limits on threads, no process forking, and custom MPI messaging instead of a TCP/IP stack.